A Note from Chris

Beer, Beer, and Even More Beer

It’s the leadup until Christmas and boy do we have the selection of beer for you. We predictably have our core lineup – Farmer’s Daughter, Whistling Paddler, Class V, Midnight Stout, Legion Lager and KLR93. 6 beers that are representative of a variety of styles to suit many different tastes.

What’s really exciting however is the additional styles that we currently have available and those that are coming soon.

Astrolabe Session IPA was extremely popular this summer and while we are out of that style until 2019, we do have a great alternative for the juicy hop lover. Icebreaker is available in store in growlers (cans 2019) and is a Brut IPA. This is a brand new style of beer that adopts some winemaking techniques to add an element of dryness to the beer. This is potentially my favourite beer that we’ve made…for now anyway.

Timber Tails, is our first collaboration beer and is made in partnership with Small Pony Barrel Works in Kanata. This is a sour beer which may be different for many of our regular drinkers but I strongly recommend trying it. It has a light malt base that is aged and soured in oak barrels and is dry hopped with Citra hops and blended with Chamomile Tea. Our Brewmaster Sean and their owner/founder, also Sean, collaborated on this for approximately 6 months and it was absolutely worth the wait. Timber Tails is a lead up to our own kettle sour series which begins in the new year. 2-3 sours will be brewed in limited quantities come January. Blood Moon and Wild Bog are two names that will be featuring. Can anyone guess what flavours they’ll involve?

Peanut Butter Shake was released in our retail store this past weekend and will be on shelves in LCBO’s in the next week (ish). This is a peanut butter and chocolate milk stout that tastes as good as it sounds. The 12 Beers of Christmas is almost sold out with less than 100 cases remaining! This year we moved to cans in order to increase quality and consistency. As a result, we’ve also been able to reduce the price to consumers so this is a win-win for everyone!

Overall, I feel we have our best selection of beer ever on the market and it’s worth chatting about. For anyone wanting more information, please reach out and I’m happy to answer any questions.

Cheers,

Chris Thompson

Brewery News

Introducing a New Seasonal in the LCBO

As of the first week of December, we will be adding another seasonal to our LCBO lineup. Peanut Butter Shake is a Stout with strong notes of peanut and a background of chocolate, caramel, and sweet cream. This easy drinking, medium bodied sweet stout has a well rounded malt finish that’s sure to cure your peanut butter cravings.

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

That’s right! Christmas is fast approaching and that means its time for the 12 Beers of Christmas. We know many of you have been patiently waiting to see what new flavours and old favourites will be available this year. This year’s 12 Beers will have 6 returning flavours and 6 completely new and is now available for pick up. Oh, and did we mention they will be in cans as well. Now that is something to cheers too!

“All I want for Christmas is WBC”

This year, give the gift of WBC with some of this season’s beer based gift packs, or make your own with any of our new products like toques, camper mugs and Christmas sweaters. Hate wrapping? Let us do it for you. Check out this year’s Holiday Gift Guide for ideas and information.

Beer 101

Peanut Butter Shake Time

By Brewmaster Sean

The conversation started summer 2017. Our Off-Premise Sales Manager, Tim, had asked if we could make a peanut butter stout because one of our clients, Elgin Beer Project, had been looking for a beer in this style. This light a fire for us to try and make it. But how could we do it? I’ve heard of other breweries making them with some horror stories of peanut butter clogging kegs and drafts system. As well as chunks of peanut butter floating in the beer. This isn’t something we wanted to happen. But how could we make a peanut butter beer without peanut butter?

The research and development process took months. At first, I tried to make some peanut butter “soup” to see if we could just add that to the beer. But as you can imagine, peanut butter doesn’t want to break down. This led to a very oily and chunky substance floating in the glass. The taste was horrible as well. It was more like a watered-down stout with peanut oils. After a couple of tries at this we had to move on.

I was in Costco one day and saw powdered peanut butter. This was the key, I thought. We can add this powder to the beer and bam, we now have peanut butter stout! But alas, the final product was cloudy and full of floating particulate. The flavour was much better, but it wasn’t perfect, and the appearance was less than appetizing. Back to the drawing board.

It had been a number of months at this point, as we are in the middle of Summer and the brewery was running full tilt to try and keep up with demand, which wasn’t easy. So, I went down the road most brewers won’t even think of… extract. I had some samples brought in and with first try it was almost perfect. I was shocked at how well the extract tasted in the beer. I had a lot of feelings at that point. I had an initial hesitation with extract, and as a result I just wanted to say we couldn’t do it. The other side of me was screaming, “it tastes so damn good!” So, we tried to make some kegs of it, but there was something missing that I just couldn’t figure out. There were a lot of nights I was up thinking about this beer and I didn’t know what to do, until one day, I thought chocolate. I had some chocolate samples from the extract company, so we made up another keg with both the peanut and chocolate extract and it was the perfect marriage. The looked amazing, and was damn tasty, so we decide to send some off to Elgin Beer Project. It was a huge success and I am happy that we were able to make the beer he wanted, which his clients seemed to love it as well.

With the beer being such a success, we talked about doing it on a larger scale. We would need to have a lot of interest to justify brewing a large batch. We submitted it to the winter seasonal SKU at the LCBO and waited patiently until it was accepted. That’s right, we will be selling this lovely beer in the LCBO starting in December. With a full 7000 liters of Peanut Butter Shake already canned and ready for distribution and a number of LCBOs pre-ordering, you should see it on many shelves for the holiday season. If you like peanut butter and beer, this won’t disappoint. I hope you will all try it and let me know your thoughts. How do you feel the blend is? Do you love it or hate it? Is this a go to beer or just something you’ll have one of? We’d love to hear your feedback.